Abhinay Muthoo, head of the department of economics at the University of Warwick

There is too much arrogance: while having strong independent identities is crucial for success what is missing is the crossovers in a deep sense. We are all living and work in silos. More academics need to be more open minded and more civil servants need to be more open minded.

Increase the volume and quality of interaction: this means people allocate a finite resource: their time to do so. To make this happen enable civil servants to spend time on short-medium secondments, at universities, and for academics to do the same in Whitehall. It happens but to a very small extent. We don't have a culture to do so in the UK.

The REF 2014 puts significant weight on research impact for the first time: (REF 2014 is the government's university research assessment exercise.) This will incentivise universities to engage more with public policy issues and shows government and Whitehall are emphasising open policy making... so the future is bright

Academics and non-academics speak different languages: training would be helpful for both groups. Invest time and money on a regular basis to bring civil servants up to speed with latest research, and academics with the key questions and issues of the day that concern government and the private sector. It happens but I think on the fringes of society. We need to bring this into the mainstream.

June Thoburn, emeritus professor of social work at the University of East Anglia and a member of the UEA Centre for Research on Children and Families. Faculty member at the College of Social Work

We can't ignore power differentials and career aspirations: sources of independent research funding in the policy area are harder to come by so a higher proportion of policy research tends to be government initiated and government-funded. Academics needing to seek such funding find themselves having to be careful about how they frame their conclusions, or find their conclusions being 'tweaked' by the funders. At least peer reviewed articles provide an outlet for refereed versions of research finding that may give a more rounded account of the research than the official summaries that appear on government websites. But then, how does the researcher get the full account read by policy makers and practitioners (who need the detail as they are the implementers of the recommended policy) alongside the official summary?

Policy makers at the top levels tend to be generalists: they tend to want a few key bullet points. They want us to tell them 'what works'. You see them glazing over when you say 'well that depends for whom - babies? teenagers? disabled? at what stage of their lives?' A useful entree is the select committees that have the 'expert' advisers and are more willing to give space to hear about complexity.

Jonathan Cave, senior tutor in economics at the University of Warwick and senior research fellow at RAND Europe

Some government departments have a closed community of 'pet scientists': who come to share the policymakers' perspectives and prejudices to an unhealthy degree. An academic who is content to take a narrow and rigorous view of a topic may be easy to co-opt; in the same way a policymaker who is captured by a theory or an idea may systematically misunderstand the scientific advice she or he receives. Something more than a 'service delivery' relationship is required.

Academics and policy makers often seek 'impact' as a primary objective: this can lead to short-termism, excessive path dependence and a lack of continuity as political players succeed one another. It also drives uncertainty, aversion and a disinclination to learn any but negative lessons from others' experience.

Policymakers are often time-constrained and driven by outside events: this leads many of the conversations to have a very directed or 'functional' quality that academics find distinctly off-putting.

Alan Harding, director of the Heseltine Institute for Public Policy and Practice

'Nudge' theory came along at the right time: at a point where low cost initiatives that might achieve meaningful cumulative impacts were increasingly attractive to politicians and policy-makers. The Cabinet Office's record in joining up and refashioning approaches in other policy fields is mixed, I would have thought. Whitehall will listen if it thinks academics have a better understanding of issues than they can source elsewhere. It's up to us to prove it, though.

'Evidence informed' policy is a better formulation: I hope there aren't many of us academics who would seriously want to take politics, judgement and leadership out of the policy process and argue for 'one best answer' to each and every complex question. It would be nice to think that policy choices, especially the most difficult ones, take on board relevant evidence.

Common complaints about academics are not general truths: they are that we're not fast enough, are too equivocal in how we report the policy-relevance of our findings and are not sufficiently interested in prosaic issues about delivery. All are valid to some extent and of some academics but they're not general truths. It comes back to the same thing, really, which is about how we jointly understand how these barriers to effective engagement have been overcome and what that experience means for how we try to deepen relationships in the future.

The market for generalist public policy masters courses is not buoyant: what seems to be really energising discussion at the moment - hence the proliferation of 'what works centres' - is that, in austere times, when intelligence capacity within the public sector has shrunk alarmingly, academics can somehow step into the vacuum. We really need some good working models of how to link the supply side to the demand side, which is vast but difficult to 'read'.

Jonathan Breckon, manager of the Alliance for Useful Evidence

Academics are 'scary', according to one senior civil servant: in the report Evidence and evaluation in policy making by the Institute of Government. But others were full of praise although, admittedly for their chosen pet academic. A former chief analyst gave advice to his colleagues: "there are some good academics out there, who know their stuff, think rigorously and understand the policy process. They can engage in a personal and very immediate sense senior people including ministers. If you're lucky enough to have some of those academics out there, make the most of them."

The 'What Works centres' are a massive opportunity: led by the ESRC, Cabinet Office and the Big Lottery Fund, these new centres have the ambitious task of improving the links between the supply, the demand, and the use of evidence. The key to success will be juggling independence with relevance. You have to be close to the action, but also fiercely independent. The Institute for Fiscal Studies does this brilliantly, in my view.

You need to get into the shoes of a civil servant, politician or frontline professional: The ESRC secondment scheme for researchers and PhDs to go and work inside Whitehall and public services is very popular. There are also 'shadowing' schemes for researchers in parliament. I'm afraid the reverse secondment - civil servants into academia, has been very hard to do in practice. Just not the career incentives to make it happen.

Dave O'Brien, lecturer in cultural and creative industries at City University London. His work on cultural value includes a recent secondment and report to the Department for Culture Media and Sport

We elect politicians and we dont elect academics: so there is a balance between academics providing research to inform and assist versus them actually taking decisions. But I suspect this is a bigger issue that takes us into political philosophy.

It's daft to deny policy-based evidence doesn't happen: there is no easy solution to this. One way of thinking about it might be to accept that evidence use is always political, after all we elect people rather than being governed by research technocrats. The problem comes when the research itself is produced in ways which are designed to justify a policy, rather than being drawn upon to inform, shape or evaluate policy.

We shouldn't see this as academics and Whitehall: rather there is a very wide eco system of organisations and individuals working on evidence, research and policy. It is not unusual to see organisations and individuals as having multiple roles and agendas. Civil servants may often have a triple role as commissioners, consumers and then translators of academic research. Focusing on the 'demand' side, for example giving comissioners training, can be just as important as the academic 'supply'

Jon Poole, research and intelligence manager in policy and partnerships at Bath and North East Somerset council

There's a reasonable risk of confidence and numeracy issues: any training would need to be sympathetic to those needs. Some may not have come across an academic text since their own time in academia.

The issue of accessibility is still critical: there's a reason why the often maligned data journalism movement is so popular. All the training and development in the world won't get away from the fact that a piece of poor data prettily visualised will get more weight than one that is statistically sound. Yes please to any product that exists outside academic journals. Paid access to one side they have to be one of the least accessible methods of accessing information known to the internet. The big think tanks, for all their ideological prerogatives, are very good at presenting their information in an effective way and ultimately, they do get listened to. Perhaps there's something for academia to learn from them in style, if not in substance.

Toby Lasserson, senior editor of The Cochrane Library, international source of trustworthy, independent and relevant information to guide healthcare decisions

A systematic review is effective for summarizing findings: SR methods have contributed much to our understanding of what research gets done, why it gets done & where it gets published (if at all). Like many forms of research it is open to different ways of doing things and some SRs are more equal than others. We should be promoting systematic approaches to integrating research findings into policy areas.

The barriers to evidence-based practice are for 'individual' decisions rather than at service level: we have tailored what we produce to try and fit that context. Perhaps we should also be thinking at higher level engagement, especially as policymakers need something different to what we routinely offer them, for example cost-effectiveness and implementation rather evidence of benefit or harm of an intervention.

Policy makers are often frustrated with what gets produced by science academics: they seem to find that the research is often not sufficiently definitive with too many caveats and imprecise findings.

• Want your say? Email us at public.leaders@theguardian.com.

To get our articles on policy and leadership direct to your inbox, sign up to the Guardian Public Leaders Network now.